A veteran Associated Press reporter
who covered America's early space shots was outraged when the directors of "The Right
Stuff" used a troupe of acrobats in suits to portray the journalists. He felt the
image of monkey-like reporters scaling trees and climbing over fences to spy on the wives
and children of the astronauts exaggerated what happened. "We may have pissed on
their lawn," the AP reporter growled, "but we never broke any windows."

For many years, I agreed that the movie
version of obnoxious reporters jabbing microphones in the faces of people caught in the
news was a bit over the top. Most reporters, I knew, were hard-working professionals. But
with the melt-down over the Monica Lewinsky "scandal," I can no longer argue the
point.

Washington journalism has become a scandal
in its own right, worse than any movie portrayal. In combination with aggressive
conservatives determined to negate the results of the last two presidential elections, the
media now is threatening the very democratic system that a free press was meant to
safeguard.

Driven by competition and baited to prove
it's not "liberal," the Washington press corps has joined a kind of a coup
d'etat for the Information Age. New evidence shows just how successful President Clinton's
enemies have been in manipulating this "scandal" and turning reporters into
collaborators.

In an account published on June 22, an
associate editor of U.S. News & World Report reviewed two hours of previously
undisclosed tapes made by Linda Tripp of her conversations with Lewinsky. The tapes
revealed Tripp trying to lead Lewinsky into damaging admissions and suggesting actions
that the press would later interpret as evidence of Clinton obstructing justice. Tripp,
for instance, urges Lewinsky to ask Clinton for a job, the very action that rests at the
center of ongoing impeachment speculation.

According to the U.S. News account,
the two hours of tapes do indicate that Lewinsky was infatuated with Clinton but only
support suspicions that Lewinsky engaged in suggestive phone conversations with the
president. Complimenting Lewinsky on her sultry voice, Tripp declared, "No wonder the
president likes to have phone sex with you." Lewinsky doesn't answer.

'Pressgate'

The U.S. News story comes on the
heels of a 29-page report in the new magazine, Brill's Content, in which editor
Steven Brill supplies other details on how the media was used, wittingly or not, as a
political weapon. Tracing the first three weeks of the Lewinsky "scandal,"
sometimes hour by hour, Brill exposes how thoroughly two Clinton-hating operatives --
Lucianne Goldberg and Linda Tripp -- stage-managed the opening acts and how conservative
special prosecutor Kenneth Starr then directed the press hysteria that followed.

"What makes the media's performance a
true scandal, a true example of an institution being corrupted to its core, is that the
competition for scoops so bewitched almost everyone that they let the man in power [Starr]
write the story -- once Tripp and Goldberg put it together for him," Brill wrote as a
lead-in to the article called "Pressgate." [Brill's Content, Aug. 1998]

Brill concluded that many of the disclosures
to Starr's favored reporters -- The Washington Post's Susan Schmidt, Newsweek's
Michael Isikoff and ABC News' Jackie Judd -- came from a combination of the Goldberg-Tripp
duo and Starr's office. Brill used tough language, calling some reporters "lap
dogs" and others "stenographers."

"I have personally seen internal memos
from inside three news organizations that cite Starr's office as a source," Brill
wrote. "For an internal publication circulated to New York Times employees
in April, Washington editor Jill Abramson is quoted in a discussion about problems
covering the Lewinsky story as saying, '[T]his story was very much driven in the beginning
on sensitive information that was coming out of the prosecutor's office'."

What is less clear, however, is whether
Starr's office helped on some of the wildly erroneous accounts, such as the Lewinsky's
semen-stained dress love trophy and the president caught-in-the-act tale. William
Ginsburg, Lewinsky's lawyer, has alleged that Starr leaked some sensitive stories as a
tactic to pressure Lewinsky into providing testimony that Starr wanted.

With fresh details, Brill's article
explained how conservative book agent Goldberg and her wannabe book author Tripp primed
the scandal pump. Both wanted to damage the Clinton administration for political and
financial reasons. Goldberg also had experience in dirty tricks having worked for Richard
Nixon's 1972 campaign as a spy posing as a journalist inside the McGovern campaign.

It's been known for months that Goldberg
urged Tripp to begin taping her young friend, Monica Lewinsky, and that Tripp had been
toying with the idea of writing a tell-all White House book. But Brill uncovered new
elements of the Goldberg-Tripp manipulation.

According to Brill's article, Goldberg even
arranged for her brother's courier service to handle letters and packages that Lewinsky
allegedly sent to Clinton. "We told Linda [Tripp] to suggest that Monica use a
courier service to send love letters to the president," Goldberg said. "And we
told her what courier service to use. Then, we told Spikey [Goldberg's nickname for
Newsweek's Isikoff] to call the service."

Further, Tripp and Goldberg told Isikoff
that one of the packages contained a lurid sex tape. As corroboration for that claim, the
Goldberg family courier service made available the courier who delivered the tape. He
helpfully confirmed to Isikoff that one package appeared to contain a tape.

Keeping the Jones Up

Having gotten Newsweek's attention,
the Goldberg-Tripp duo then made sure that Paula Jones's legal team knew about Lewinsky.
In October 1997, the Jones's lawyers began receiving anonymous phone calls from an
unidentified woman -- apparently Tripp. With that information, the Jones's lawyers knew
enough to subpoena Lewinsky and Tripp.

With Lewinsky and Tripp subpoenaed -- and
with a tape recorder rolling -- Tripp then drew Lewinsky into conversations about what
they should say to the Jones lawyers. Tripp apparently hoped to use the conversations to
create the legal basis for an obstruction of justice case against Clinton. But, as Brill
reported, Lewinsky instead provided exculpatory evidence on this point.

When the Goldberg-Tripp team selected the
two most incriminating tapes to play for Newsweek correspondents, the reporters
heard no evidence that Clinton tried to make Lewinsky lie about the purported affair.
"In fact," Isikoff said, "there is one passage where Linda, knowing the
tape is going, says, 'He knows you're going to lie; you've told him, haven't you?' She
seems like she's trying to get Monica to say it. But Monica says no."

So Newsweek remained skeptical
about this story that was being served up on a silver platter. But Tripp forced the issue
by taking her information to Starr's office, too. On Jan. 12-13, Starr's investigators
debriefed Tripp and then insisted that she wear a wire for a scripted conversation with
Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton in the Pentagon City section of Arlington, Va.

On Jan. 14, Goldberg brought Isikoff up to
speed about Starr's entrance into the case. Then, on Jan. 16, Tripp lured Lewinsky to
another meeting at the Ritz-Carlton. Starr's investigators surrounded the young woman and
pressured her to cooperate.

Those efforts went on into the evening, when
Tripp excused herself and returned home. There, she briefed Paula Jones's lawyers who were
scheduled to depose the president under oath the next day. Armed with that information,
Jones's lawyers surprised Clinton with detailed questions about Lewinsky. He denied a
sexual relationship.

Meanwhile, Starr's office was urging Newsweek
to hold its story to give the prosecutors more time to build their case. Newsweek
did, but Internet gossip columnist Matt Drudge received a tip about the spiked story,
again most likely from the Goldberg-Tripp duo.

On Jan. 21, the story broke with full force
in a front-page Washington Post account by Susan Schmidt, Peter Baker and Toni
Locy. That story quoted "sources" as saying that "in some of the
conversations -- including one in recent days -- Lewinsky described Clinton and [his
friend Vernon] Jordan directing her to testify falsely" in the Jones case.

Brill noted that the perjury claim, which
the Post article reported that sources heard on the tapes, was exactly what
"had been missing from the tapes that Newsweek heard. This is not a minor
point. The charge that Lewinsky had been instructed to lie was not only the linchpin of
Starr's expanded jurisdiction, but would be the nub of any impeachment action against the
president -- and the premise of all of the front-page stories and hours of talk show
dialogue that would follow."

Still, with the Post story setting
the city abuzz and the Ginsberg-Tripp team handing out hot tips to friendly reporters, the
Washington media scrambled to get in line. The reporters, who had curried favor with
Starr's office during the long Whitewater investigation, had choice spots.

One sloppy story followed the next, with
news outlets rushing out thinly sourced allegations which were then "matched" or
simply repeated by pundits who took the dubious information to the next level by
commenting on the greater meaning. The talking heads opined that Clinton likely would
resign within days.

But often the stories turned out to be
wrong. Goldberg later boasted about planting the infamous story about Lewinsky saving a
dress stained with the president's semen. Goldberg said she had heard the bizarre tale
from Tripp, though it might not have been on any tape, and Goldberg admitted that she
might have embroidered the story. "I might have added the part about it being
saved," Goldberg said. The FBI found no semen on Lewinsky's clothes.

Illegal Leaks?

Though Brill's story concentrated on the
reckless reporting, most of the press reaction has centered on Starr's admission that he
and a senior deputy, Jackie Bennett Jr., routinely briefed selected reporters about the
investigation. "I have talked with reporters on background on some occasions,"
Starr said, "but Jackie has been the primary person involved in that. He has spent
much of his time talking to individual reporters."

Brill noted that Starr's statement
conflicted with the special prosecutor's own public utterances decrying leaks. On Feb. 5,
for instance, Starr told an impromptu news conference that he could not comment
"about the status of someone who might be a witness [because] that goes to the heart
of the grand jury process."

Early on, Starr also engaged in a testy
exchange with Clinton's lawyers over their complaints about leaks from his office. Calling
"leaks utterly intolerable," Starr declared that "I have made the
prohibition of leaks a principal priority of this office. It is a firing offense, as well
as one that leads to criminal prosecution."

But even before publication of Starr's
admission, investigator reporter Dan Moldea had disclosed that another Starr deputy,
Hickman Ewing, had acknowledged that "despite [Starr's] statements to the contrary,
[Starr] is the person who is actually approving which reporters receive what
information." [CNN's Burden of Proof, May 27, 1998]

Faced with the leak revelations, Starr did
not deny that he had talked to favored reporters on "background" -- that is, on
a not-for-attribution basis. But he mounted a spirited defense of the legality of his
actions.

On June 16, in a 19-page rebuttal to Brill's
article, Starr insisted that he scrupulously abided by a criminal statute, known as Rule
6(e), which prohibits disclosure of testimony given before a grand jury. Starr added
further that his office "does not and has not released information provided by
witnesses during witness interviews, except as authorized by law." (Italics
added.)

The key part of that second sentence is the
phrase "except as authorized by law." In effect, the wording acknowledges that
Starr had released confidential witness information to the press but that he considers his
disclosures "authorized by law."

Starr argued that the leak guidelines have
big loopholes that allow wide-ranging briefings of reporters. "We should discuss the
causes of delay in our investigation," Starr wrote. "We should correct public
misinformation about the legal views, strategy and tactics of this office to the extent we
can without interfering with the investigation or violating Rule 6(e) -- lest the public,
courts, witnesses and jurors receive misimpressions about the integrity of the office. Our
dealings with other public and government agencies are proper topics of discussion with
reporters."

Yet, given that the Lewinsky investigation
has dominated Washington debate for months, has been filled with
"misinformation," and involves the White House as well as other government
agencies, Starr's loopholes would seem to give him a virtual carte blanche for leaking.

Other legal experts simply don't agree with
Starr's reading of the law. They note that recent court rulings suggest that Rule 6(e)
extends to pre-interviews that are done with witnesses who may be called before a grand
jury or to other evidence that might affect the grand jury deliberations. Justice
Department guidelines also prohibit unofficial release of information that might prejudice
a case or infringe on the privacy rights of a prospective defendant.

Former Reagan-Bush lawyer Ronald K. Noble
noted that Starr's "denials beg the question of what Mr. Starr considers grand jury
material, what he believes is authorized by law and what he and Mr. Bennett actually said
to reporters." Noting that Starr promised a leak inquiry last February (whose results
have never been divulged), Noble added that the inquiry must now be put in the hands of an
independent investigator. [NYT, June 19, 1998]

Zeal or Prejudice?

Whatever the outcome of the leak dispute,
Brill's article contributes to a growing body of evidence that Starr's investigation has
never been a dispassionate, even-handed pursuit of wrongdoing. From his controversial
appointment by a conservative-dominated three-judge panel in August 1994, Starr has
approached his job with an apparent determination to pin some crime on Clinton, even if
one needed to be contrived.

After nearly four years of that quest, Starr
has gone down numerous dead ends, finding no case against Clinton on Whitewater,
Travelgate, Filegate, Vincent Foster's suicide and Mena drug trafficking. Yet, Starr has
cleared Clinton of suspicion only on the false rumors about Foster's death. The rest are
still in play despite a lack of evidence.

Now, Starr appears determined to build a
report urging Clinton's impeachment around an alleged cover-up of a sexual relationship
with Lewinsky. Starr is threatening the young woman with a criminal indictment if she will
not testify as he wants. The Washington pundits are already arguing that the stories about
apparent abuses of power by the prosecutor should not distract from the grander issue of
Clinton's guilt.